Android applications are strange beasts. Even though under the hood it’s basically a UNIX system using Linux as its kernel, there are other layers between (native) android apps and the bare system, that some things are bound to fall through the cracks.

When developing android apps, one generally doesn’t login to the actual device to compile and execute the program; instead a cross-compiler is provided by google, along with a series of tools to package, install, and execute the app. The degrees of separation from the actual controlling terminal of the application, make it harder to just print debugging messages to the stdout and stderr streams and watch the output like one could do while hacking a regular program. For this reason, the android NDK provides a set of logging functions, which append the messages to a global log buffer. The log buffer can be viewed and followed remotely, from the development machine, over USB, by using the “adb logcat” tool.

This is all well and good, but if you’re porting a program which prints a lot of messages to stdout/stderr, or if you just like the convenience of using the standard printf/cout/etc functions, instead of funny looking stuff like __android_log_print(), you might wonder if there is a way to just use the standard I/O streams instead, right? Well so did I, and guess what… this is still UNIX so the answer is of course you can!

Edit: I have since ported this test program to use LibOVR 0.4.4, and works fine on both GNU/Linux and Windows.

I’ve been hacking with my new Oculus Rift DK2 on and off for the past couple of weeks now. I won’t go into how awesome it is, or how VR is going to change the world, and save the universe or whatever; everybody who cares, knows everything about it by now. I’ll just share my experiences so far in programming the damn thing, and post a very simple OpenGL test program I wrote last week to try it out, that might serve as a baseline.

Once upon a time, I made a special kind of demoscene production: a wedtro. Which is a kind of small demo, made as a present to some other member of the demoscene, who is getting married. This wedtro, turned out to be the buggiest piece of shit I’ve ever released, and it’s been bugging me for the past decade. Until today I decided to fix it.

I revisited recently a dormant project of mine, for which I unfortunately need to write a 3dsmax exporter plugin.

Now, I’m always pissed off from the start when I have to write code on windows and visual studio, but having to deal with 3dsmax on top of that, really just adds insult to injury. It’s not just that maxsdk is a convoluted mess. Or that it needs a very specific version of visual studio to write plugins for it (which is really Microsoft’s fault, to be fair). No, my biggest issue so far is that 3dsmax takes about 3 years to start up, and there is no way to unload, or reload a plugin without restarting it.

Whenever I fix a tiny thing in the exporter plugin I’m writting, and I want to try it out and see if it does the buissiness, I have to shut down 3dsmax, start it up again (which takes forever), load my test scene, then try to export again and see what happens. This is obviously unacceptable, so I really had to do something about it.

This is a short post with my thoughts on what’s the best way to design a transformation hierarchy for animation, and how the “ideal design” changes over time.

Bottom-up lazy evaluation magic

For a long time, I was a big fan of backwards (bottom-up) lazy evaluation of transformation hierarchies. Essentially having an XFormNode class for each node in the hierarchy with a get_matrix(long msec) function which calculates the current node’s transformation matrix for the current time, then calls parent->get_matrix(msec) and returns the concatenated matrix.

Of course, such a scheme would be wasteful if these matrices where calculated every time get_matrix functions are called. For instance if a node is part of a hierarchy, then its get_matrix will be called when we need to draw the object corresponding to this node, and also every time the get_matrix of any one of its descendants is called, due to the recursive bottom-up evaluation of matrices outlined previously. If one considers the posibility of drawing an object multiple times for various multi-pass algorithms the problem gets worse, with the limiting worse case scenario being if we’re doing ray-tracing which would require these functions to be called at the very least once per ray cast.

It follows then, that such a design goes hand in hand with lazy evaulation and caching of calculated node matrices. The XFormNode class would hold the last requested time and corresponding matrix, and when get_matrix is called, if the requested time matches the last one, we just return the cached matrix instead of recalculating it.

This worked nicely for a long time, and it worked like magic. At any point I could just ask for the transform at time X and would get the matrix automatically, including any effects of hierarchy, keyframe interpolations, etc. It’s all good… until suddenly processors stopped getting faster any more, moore’s law went belly up, and after the shock passed we all sooner or later realised that single-threaded graphics programs are a thing of the past.

Multithreading pissed on my rug

In the brave new multithreaded world, lazy evaluation becomes a pain in the ass. The first knee-jerk reaction is to add a mutex in XFormNode, and lock the hell out of the cached matrices. And while that might be ok for an OpenGL program which won’t have more than a couple of threads working with the scene database at any point (since rendering itself can only be done safely from a single thread), it throws out of the window a lot of concurrency that can take place in a raytracer where at any point there could be 8 or more threads asking for the matrix of any arbitrary node.

A second way to deal with this issue is to have each thread keep its own copy of the matrix cache, keeping it in thread-specific memory. I’m shamed to admit I never got around to doing any actual performance comparisons on this, though I’ve used it for quite some time in my programs. In theory it avoids having to wait for any other thread to access the cache, so it should be faster in theory, but it needs a pthread_getspecific call in every get_matrix invocation which comes with its own overhead.

This works fine, and although we managed to avoid blocking concurrent use of get_matrix, we had to add some amount of overhead for thread-specific storage calls, and the code became much more complex all over the place: invalidations must also access this thread-specific storage, we need cleanup for the per-thread MatrixCache objects, etc.

Return of the top-down evaluation

So nowadays I’m starting to lean more towards the simpler, less automagic design of top-down evaluation. It boils down to just going through the hierarchy once to calculate all the matrices recursively, then at any point we can just grab the previously calculated matrix of any node and use it.

The simplicity of this two-pass approach is hard to overlook, however it’s just not as good for some things as my original ideal method. It works fine for OpenGL programs where it suffices to calculate transformations once per frame, it even works fine for simple raytracers where we have again a single time value for any given frame. However it breaks down for ray-tracers doing distribution ray tracing for motion blur.

No rest for the wicked

The best way to add motion blur to a ray tracer is through a monte-carlo method invented by Cook, Porter and Carpenter, called “distribution ray tracing“. In short, when spawining primary rays we have to choose a random time in the interval centered around the frame time and extending to the past and future, as far as dictated by the shutter speed of the camera. This time is then used both to calculate the position and direction of the ray, which thus might differ between sub-pixels if the camera is moving, and to calculate the positions of the objects we’re testing for intersections against. Then if we cast many rays per pixel and average the results, we’ll get motion blur on anything that moves significantly while the virtual shutter is open (example from my old s-ray renderer).

It’s obvious that calculating matrices once per frame won’t cut it with advanced ray-tracers, so there’s no getting rid of the complexity of the lazy bottom-up scheme in that case. Admittedly, however, caching won’t do much for us either because every sub-pixel will request the matrix at a different time anyway, so we might as well just calculate matrices from scratch all the time, and skip the thread-specific access overhead. The jury is still out on that one.

Do you have a favourite design for hierarchical animation code? Feel free to share it by leaving a comment below!

Color grading is an easily overlooked, but extremely powerful way to add character to a game. Subtle color changes make day-night cycling much more atmospheric. Different areas can have their own signature “feel” based on how saturated the colors are. Dark games can shift the unlit areas of an environment to cool bluish tint that can remain visible but still feel like darkness. The possibilities are endless.

I haven’t given much thought to color grading before, until a friend (Samurai), told me of an extremely simple and powerful way to add color grading to a game. So simple in fact, that I had to try it as soon as possible!

The idea has two parts. First the obvious bit: Use a 3D texture as a look-up table, to map the RGB colors produced by the renderer to a different set of RGB colors which is the color-graded output. That translates to pretty much the following GLSL post-processing fragment shader:

And now the brilliant bit: write a bit of code to save a screenshot of the game with the “identity” 3D lookup-table serialized in the last few scanlines. Give that screenshot to an artist, and let him work his magic, color-grading it in photoshop or whatever… Did you get that? In the process of color-grading that screenshot, the artist automatically produces the look-up table which can be used to reproduce the same color-grading in-game, as part of the last few scanlines of the image! Feed that palette back into the game and it’s automatically color-graded!

So I used the dungeon crawler I’ve been writing recently to try out this algorithm. The output of my dungeon crawler as it stands, is not the best material to try color-grading on as it’s already very dark and highly tinted, leaving too little space for tweaking without banding everything to oblivion, but nevertheless I wrote the code, gave the screenshot to my friend Rawnoise to play with it in photoshop for a couple of minutes, fed it back into the game, and the result can be seen below.

Lower-left part of the screenshot produced by the game, with the identity palette attached:

Screenshot of the game before and after color grading:

Of course you can always opt for a completely bizarre effect just as easily. This is the result of me moving color curves in gimp randomly, and then feeding the resulting palette into the game:

Obviously this algorithm opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities, such as having two palettes and interpolating between them during sunset, or when a player crosses the boundary between two areas, etc. Simple, yet effective.

All my previous stereoscopic attempts are fun and cool, but what I really wanted was to manage to connect my cheap-o shutter glasses to my computer, and use them for stereoscopic rendering. The main barrier is that consumer nvidia cards do not include a stereo port (unlike expensive quadros), and their drivers don’t support stereoscopic OpenGL visuals.

I had already side-stepped the second problem by writing stereowrap, an LD_PRELOAD-based tool that fakes OpenGL stereo contexts for GLX apps and presents the stereo pair in a number of ways, such as various anaglyphs, side-by-side, etc.

So at some point I decided to attack the first problem. Turns out there’s a simple way to drive shutter glasses. It’s a brilliant idea, and I didn’t come up with it, but it boils down to making a simple circuit that toggles the shutter glasses when it detects a pulse on the montior vsync wire!

I immediately designed a circuit based on this design, but modified to work with the signals expected by my ASUS VR-100 shutter glasses. Then I wired it up on a perfboard, and it worked like a charm! Finally I added a sequential stereo presentation method to stereowrap, synchronized with vsync, and suddenly I can view all my stereoscopic programs in awesome full-color stereo glory.

The downside to this simple contraption is that it doesn’t really know whether the left or the right image is presented at any given time, it only knows when to switch between them. That’s why the switch is included in the circuit: if the image appears wrong, and you can really tell by your brain attempting to blow up while looking at it, the switch can be used to flip the glasses around instantly. If however the application can’t catch up with the refresh rate of the monitor and misses a vsync interval the images will flip again.

I plan to build a more intelligent, microcontroller-based, driver circuit at some point. But for now, the simple vsync driver works well enough.